Heterogeneous treatment under regression discontinuity design : application to female high school enrolment

This paper undertakes a regression discontinuity (RD) framework with multiple cutoffs unlike typical RD setting where researchers normalize the score variable and pool all the observations. This paper explores this heterogeneity in the effect of Islamic mayor on female secular high schooling in Turkey using the multiple cutoff RD framework developed in Cattaneo et al. (2016). The presence of many parties in the 1994 municipality election in Turkey means that vote share of the strongest opponent party can vary substantially leading to different cutoffs. Meyersson (2014) finds that Islamic mayors of 1994 promoted female high schooling using a normalized and pooled RD framework, which averages the effect across all the different cutoffs. We extend his work by segregating the effect of Islamic mayor across different opponent party's vote shares. Our results suggest that the positive effect on female secular high school attainment was more pronounced in municipalities where the strongest opponent party was secular than where the opponent was conservative. This heterogeneity can be attributed to a policy change in 1999, which restricted religious high school graduates from entering universities.

Publication year:2019